Frederick the Great: Prussia's warrior king and his battles

Few rulers have been judged so differently. To Prussian and German historians of the nineteenth century he was a national hero. To Maria Theresa’s Austria he was the king who had taken Silesia. To Poles he was a prime mover of the first partition of their country. The great Prussian historian Leopold von Ranke, writing in 1878, noted that Frederick had never thought of the name “the Great” himself: posterity gave it to him, without approving everything he did, for not everything a great man does is great. The German national biography sums up the debate in one line: he has been judged very differently by his own age and by later ones.²

His war record is just as divided. The British historian Tim Blanning, in a 2015 biography that a review in the European History Quarterly calls authoritative, sets the failures beside the feats and questions old clichés such as the Prussian army as “a mobile prison” that left its soldiers no initiative. Franz Szabo, a historian of the Habsburg monarchy at the University of Alberta, goes further: his study of the war, as its publisher sums up the argument, holds that Prussia did not win the Seven Years’ War but merely survived it, despite rather than because of its king.³

Childhood: Frederick William I, Katte and Küstrin

Frederick was born in Berlin on 24 January 1712, the son of King Frederick William I, a tyrannical father fixed on the army who meant to make a soldier of his heir. The boy was raised with drill and punishment, and preferred the flute, literature and languages.⁴

In 1730, aged eighteen, he tried to flee abroad with the help of his friend Lieutenant von Katte. Both were caught. The king had his own son court-martialed and locked up in the fortress of Küstrin on the Oder, today Kostrzyn in Poland, and had Katte executed there before the crown prince’s eyes.⁵

Pardoned and reconciled with his father, Frederick married as he was told and was given the castle of Rheinsberg, north of Berlin. He later called his years there the best of his life: he studied, played music, corresponded with Voltaire and wrote the Anti-Machiavel, a refutation of Machiavelli’s advice to princes.⁶

Why did Frederick invade Silesia in 1740?

Frederick became king on 31 May 1740. On 20 October the Emperor Charles VI died, leaving his lands to his daughter Maria Theresa. Frederick saw, in the words of his German biographer, a unique chance to bring Prussia at a stroke into the game of the great powers. He had no clear legal claim to all of Silesia, but the province was rich and strategically placed, and in December 1740 his army marched in.⁷

Ranke wrote that Frederick regarded old Brandenburg claims in Silesia as an imprescriptible right of his house. W. F. Reddaway, in 1904, would have none of it: Silesia was not necessary to Prussia, and by the standards of honor between princes the attack was clearly wrong. Whether it was wise, he added, was another question.⁸

His first battle was nearly his last. At Mollwitz, on 10 April 1741, the Austrian cavalry of Marshal Neipperg broke the Prussian right, and the king, on Field Marshal Schwerin’s advice, rode away from the field. Schwerin and the infantry, standing like a rock and firing fast, won the battle without him. At Chotusitz in Bohemia, on 17 May 1742, Frederick won his first victory in personal command, and the peace signed in Berlin that July left him most of Silesia.⁹

The Second Silesian War, 1744 to 1745

In 1744, fearing that a victorious Austria would take Silesia back, Frederick went to war again. His invasion of Bohemia ended in a winter retreat in which, by Reddaway’s count, only some 40,000 of his 80,000 men came back. In 1745 the Austrians and Saxons came down into Silesia, and on 4 June Frederick fell on them at dawn at Hohenfriedberg and routed them.¹⁰

At Soor, on 30 September 1745, he won again. He later explained in his military instructions that the Austrian army there was double his, but the hills kept it from turning his wings. In December the old Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Dessau beat the Saxons at Kesselsdorf, Dresden fell, and the Peace of Dresden confirmed Silesia as Prussian. The war is told in full in our guide to the War of the Austrian Succession.¹¹

The peace years: Sanssouci, the army and the oblique order

For ten years Frederick ruled in peace. He built his summer palace of Sanssouci on the vineyard terraces of Potsdam and wanted to be buried in a vault on its top terrace. He called himself the first servant of the state, and in his Political Testament of 1752, written for his successor, he listed the lands that would round off Prussia best: Saxony, Polish Prussia and Swedish Pomerania, with Saxony the most useful.¹²

He also wrote down how he fought. A small army, his instructions taught, should choose closed and hilly ground where the enemy’s numbers could not tell, and then use “my oblique order of battle”: refuse one wing to the enemy, strengthen the wing that attacks, and throw the whole force on one flank, so that if the attack fails most of the army is still fresh. Reddaway judged that at Leuthen in 1757 the attack in oblique order was carried out “as never before or after.”¹³

1756: why did Frederick start the Seven Years’ War?

Austria had not accepted the loss of Silesia. Its chancellor Kaunitz turned the old order upside down: after Britain allied with Prussia in January 1756, Austria and France, old enemies, made their own alliance that May, and Russia joined them. Frederick expected the coalition to attack him and decided not to wait. In August 1756 he invaded Saxony, Austria’s ally.¹⁴

The small Saxon army shut itself up in its camp at Pirna. When the Austrians under Browne marched to its relief, Frederick met them at Lobositz and kept the field, and the Saxons surrendered. The war is followed year by year in our guides to the Seven Years’ War and the Third Silesian War.¹⁵

1757: Prague, Kolin, Rossbach and Leuthen

In the spring of 1757 he invaded Bohemia. On 6 May his attack outside Prague cost more blood, Reddaway wrote, than any field in Europe for nearly fifty years. Then, in June, Field Marshal Daun beat him at Kolin, and he had to lift the siege of Prague and leave Bohemia.¹⁶

The autumn saved him. At Rossbach, on 5 November, he routed a French and Imperial army about twice the size of his own, with the cavalry of General Seydlitz playing the leading part. The historian Joseph Byrne gives some 22,000 Prussians against about 45,000 allies, and losses of about 550 Prussians against perhaps 10,000.¹⁷

A month later, on 5 December, at Leuthen west of Breslau, he struck the left of a far larger Austrian army under Charles of Lorraine. Reddaway put the odds at 32,000 against nearly 80,000. The historian Hermann Beck gives about 33,000 Prussians against 65,000 Austrians, of whom some 22,000 were lost. The German Historical Institute calls the victory legendary, but narrow and costly.¹⁸

Zorndorf, Hochkirch and Kunersdorf: the worst years

In 1758 the Russians entered the war in earnest. At Zorndorf, on 25 August, Frederick drove them back. On 14 October, at Hochkirch in Saxony, Daun surprised his camp before dawn. Field Marshal Keith was killed, and in his own history Frederick wrote simply that the battle was lost.¹⁹

The Russian side had its own logic. Pyotr Saltykov chose a strong position on the heights east of Frankfurt an der Oder and planned to let the Prussians wear themselves out against his fortified left before counterattacking. On 12 August 1759, at Kunersdorf, that is what happened. The Polish historians Grzegorz Podruczny and Jakub Wrzosek put the Russian and Austrian army at about 80,000 and the Prussians at about 50,000. Frederick took the first works and drove the Russians back as far as the Jewish cemetery near Frankfurt, but there the attack stalled, Laudon’s Austrians came up, and after about seven hours his army broke and fled back across the Oder.²⁰

The same day Frederick wrote to his minister Finckenstein that his coat was riddled with shot, two horses had been killed under him, and of an army of 48,000 men he had not 3,000 left. “I believe all is lost,” he wrote. “I shall not survive the loss of my country. Farewell forever!” His German biographer says he sought death in the battle and seriously thought of suicide. Losses were heavy on both sides: the French historian Richard Waddington, working from the German staff studies, counts 530 officers and about 18,000 men killed, wounded, captured or missing on the Prussian side, and some 17,000 Russians and Austrians.²¹

The allies did not finish him. The victors had lost heavily and disagreed among themselves, and instead of marching on Berlin the Russians moved south. On 1 September Frederick wrote to his brother Henry: “I announce to you the miracle of the House of Brandenburg.”²²

Survival: Liegnitz, Torgau and the death of a tsarina

The war went on. In 1760 he beat Laudon at Liegnitz, and on 3 November he attacked Daun at Torgau. In his own account the Austrians thought they had won when the first Prussian line gave way, but that night they abandoned the field and crossed back over the Elbe.²³

Prussia was close to the end of its strength when Empress Elizabeth of Russia died in January 1762. Her death saved him. Her successor, Peter III, an admirer of the king, made peace and then an alliance with him, and Sweden followed. On 15 February 1763 the Peace of Hubertusburg restored the status quo: Prussia kept Silesia.²⁴

The partition of Poland, 1772: the Polish view

In Polish memory Frederick is above all a partitioner. In 1769 he offered Catherine II help against Turkey in return for her consent to his taking Royal Prussia. Russia refused at the time, but talks went on through his brother Prince Henry. In 1772 he got his way: in the first partition of Poland, Prussia took Royal Prussia, which it called West Prussia, and the bishopric of Warmia, but not Danzig or Thorn. The partitioners claimed they were only taking back what had once been theirs, “which nobody believed,” in the words of the Polish school curriculum.²⁵

How did Frederick the Great die?

His last war was short. In 1778 he moved to stop Austria taking Bavaria, but the War of the Bavarian Succession saw few battles. Germans called it the “Potato War,” and the Peace of Teschen in May 1779 gave Austria only the Innviertel. In 1785 he formed a League of Princes against further Austrian plans in Germany.²⁶

To his subjects he was now “Old Fritz.” He died at Sanssouci, his favorite palace, on 17 August 1786. Against his wishes he was buried beside his father in the Garrison Church in Potsdam, not on the terrace of Sanssouci.²⁷

Legacy: Napoleon, Potsdam and 1991

Twenty years later his kingdom fell to Napoleon. On 26 October 1806, after Jena, Napoleon’s bulletin reported from Potsdam that the emperor had visited the tomb of “the great Frederick” and sent his sword, his sash of the Black Eagle and his general’s belt to the Invalides in Paris, calling him one of the first captains history would remember. Read more in our life of Napoleon Bonaparte.²⁸

Later Germans made him a national myth. On 21 March 1933, the “Day of Potsdam,” the new Nazi regime staged the opening of the Reichstag in the Garrison Church where Frederick lay, and wreaths were laid in his crypt after the speeches of Hindenburg and Hitler, to show the Third Reich as heir of old Prussia.²⁹

Only after reunification was his own wish granted. On 17 August 1991, the 205th anniversary of his death, his coffin was brought back to Potsdam and buried in the vault on the top terrace of Sanssouci that he had asked for. Chancellor Helmut Kohl attended: a photograph in the Landesarchiv Berlin shows him at the sarcophagus in the courtyard of the palace that day.³⁰

So how great was he? The old Prussian school, from Ranke on, praised above all a military talent that rose to genius. Modern scholars are cooler: Blanning gives the wars only part of a long life that he reads through the court, music and the private man, and Szabo credits Prussia’s survival to others. Polish historians remember the partitioner. His place among other generals is weighed in our rankings of the greatest military commanders, the greatest commanders by era and the most influential military leaders, and his cavalry among the greatest cavalry charges.³¹